Chapter TwelveThinking in Education

1. The Essentials of Method. No one doubts, theoretically, the
importance of fostering in school good habits of thinking. But
apart from the fact that the acknowledgment is not so great in
practice as in theory, there is not adequate theoretical
recognition that all which the school can or need do for pupils,
so far as their minds are concerned (that is, leaving out certain
specialized muscular abilities), is to develop their ability to
think. The parceling out of instruction among various ends such
as acquisition of skill (in reading, spelling, writing, drawing,
reciting); acquiring information (in history and geography), and
training of thinking is a measure of the ineffective way in which
we accomplish all three. Thinking which is not connected with
increase of efficiency in action, and with learning more about
ourselves and the world in which we live, has something the
matter with it just as thought (See ante, p. 147). And skill
obtained apart from thinking is not connected with any sense of
the purposes for which it is to be used. It consequently leaves
a man at the mercy of his routine habits and of the authoritative
control of others, who know what they are about and who are not
especially scrupulous as to their means of achievement. And
information severed from thoughtful action is dead, a
mind-crushing load. Since it simulates knowledge and thereby
develops the poison of conceit, it is a most powerful obstacle to
further growth in the grace of intelligence. The sole direct
path to enduring improvement in the methods of instruction and
learning consists in centering upon the conditions which exact,
promote, and test thinking. Thinking is the method of
intelligent learning, of learning that employs and rewards mind.
We speak, legitimately enough, about the method of thinking, but
the important thing to bear in mind about method is that
thinking is method, the method of intelligent experience in the
course which it takes.

I. The initial stage of that developing experience which is
called thinking is experience. This remark may sound like a
silly truism. It ought to be one; but unfortunately it is not.
On the contrary, thinking is often regarded both in philosophic
theory and in educational practice as something cut off from
experience, and capable of being cultivated in isolation. In
fact, the inherent limitations of experience are often urged as
the sufficient ground for attention to thinking. Experience is
then thought to be confined to the senses and appetites; to a
mere material world, while thinking proceeds from a higher
faculty (of reason), and is occupied with spiritual or at least
literary things. So, oftentimes, a sharp distinction is made
between pure mathematics as a peculiarly fit subject matter of
thought (since it has nothing to do with physical existences) and
applied mathematics, which has utilitarian but not mental value.

Speaking generally, the fundamental fallacy in methods of
instruction lies in supposing that experience on the part of
pupils may be assumed. What is here insisted upon is the
necessity of an actual empirical situation as the initiating
phase of thought. Experience is here taken as previously
defined: trying to do something and having the thing perceptibly
do something to one in return. The fallacy consists in supposing
that we can begin with ready-made subject matter of arithmetic,
or geography, or whatever, irrespective of some direct personal
experience of a situation. Even the kindergarten and Montessori
techniques are so anxious to get at intellectual distinctions,
without "waste of time," that they tend to ignore -- or reduce --
the immediate crude handling of the familiar material of
experience, and to introduce pupils at once to material which
expresses the intellectual distinctions which adults have made.
But the first stage of contact with any new material, at whatever
age of maturity, must inevitably be of the trial and error sort.
An individual must actually try, in play or work, to do something
with material in carrying out his own impulsive activity, and
then note the interaction of his energy and that of the material
employed. This is what happens when a child at first begins to
build with blocks, and it is equally what happens when a
scientific man in his laboratory begins to experiment with
unfamiliar objects.

Hence the first approach to any subject in school, if thought is
to be aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic
as possible. To realize what an experience, or empirical
situation, means, we have to call to mind the sort of situation
that presents itself outside of school; the sort of occupations
that interest and engage activity in ordinary life. And careful
inspection of methods which are permanently successful in formal
education, whether in arithmetic or learning to read, or studying
geography, or learning physics or a foreign language, will reveal
that they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that they go
back to the type of the situation which causes reflection out of
school in ordinary life. They give the pupils something to do,
not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to
demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections;
learning naturally results.

That the situation should be of such a nature as to arouse
thinking means of course that it should suggest something to do
which is not either routine or capricious--something, in other
words, presenting what is new (and hence uncertain or
problematic) and yet sufficiently connected with existing habits
to call out an effective response. An effective response means
one which accomplishes a perceptible result, in distinction from
a purely haphazard activity, where the consequences cannot be
mentally connected with what is done. The most significant
question which can be asked, accordingly, about any situation or
experience proposed to induce learning is what quality of problem
it involves.

At first thought, it might seem as if usual school methods
measured well up to the standard here set. The giving of
problems, the putting of questions, the assigning of tasks, the
magnifying of difficulties, is a large part of school work. But
it is indispensable to discriminate between genuine and simulated
or mock problems. The following questions may aid in making such
discrimination. (a) Is there anything but a problem? Does the
question naturally suggest itself within some situation or
personal experience? Or is it an aloof thing, a problem only for
the purposes of conveying instruction in some school topic? Is it
the sort of trying that would arouse observation and engage
experimentation outside of school? (b) Is it the pupil's own
problem, or is it the teacher's or textbook's problem, made a
problem for the pupil only because he cannot get the required
mark or be promoted or win the teacher's approval, unless he
deals with it? Obviously, these two questions overlap. They are
two ways of getting at the same point: Is the experience a
personal thing of such a nature as inherently to stimulate and
direct observation of the connections involved, and to lead to
inference and its testing? Or is it imposed from without, and is
the pupil's problem simply to meet the external requirement?
Such questions may give us pause in deciding upon the extent to
which current practices are adapted to develop reflective habits.
The physical equipment and arrangements of the average schoolroom
are hostile to the existence of real situations of experience.
What is there similar to the conditions of everyday life which
will generate difficulties? Almost everything testifies to the
great premium put upon listening, reading, and the reproduction
of what is told and read. It is hardly possible to overstate the
contrast between such conditions and the situations of active
contact with things and persons in the home, on the playground,
in fulfilling of ordinary responsibilities of life. Much of it
is not even comparable with the questions which may arise in the
mind of a boy or girl in conversing with others or in reading
books outside of the school. No one has ever explained why
children are so full of questions outside of the school (so that
they pester grown-up persons if they get any encouragement), and
the conspicuous absence of display of curiosity about the subject
matter of school lessons. Reflection on this striking contrast
will throw light upon the question of how far customary school
conditions supply a context of experience in which problems
naturally suggest themselves. No amount of improvement in the
personal technique of the instructor will wholly remedy this
state of things. There must be more actual material, more stuff,
more appliances, and more opportunities for doing things, before
the gap can be overcome. And where children are engaged in doing
things and in discussing what arises in the course of their
doing, it is found, even with comparatively indifferent modes of
instruction, that children's inquiries are spontaneous and
numerous, and the proposals of solution advanced, varied, and
ingenious.

As a consequence of the absence of the materials and occupations
which generate real problems, the pupil's problems are not his;
or, rather, they are his only as a pupil, not as a human being.
Hence the lamentable waste in carrying over such expertness as is
achieved in dealing with them to the affairs of life beyond the
schoolroom. A pupil has a problem, but it is the problem of
meeting the peculiar requirements set by the teacher. His
problem becomes that of finding out what the teacher wants, what
will satisfy the teacher in recitation and examination and
outward deportment. Relationship to subject matter is no longer
direct. The occasions and material of thought are not found in
the arithmetic or the history or geography itself, but in
skillfully adapting that material to the teacher's requirements.
The pupil studies, but unconsciously to himself the objects of
his study are the conventions and standards of the school system
and school authority, not the nominal "studies." The thinking
thus evoked is artificially one-sided at the best. At its worst,
the problem of the pupil is not how to meet the requirements of
school life, but how to seem to meet them -- or, how to come near
enough to meeting them to slide along without an undue amount of
friction. The type of judgment formed by these devices is not a
desirable addition to character. If these statements give too
highly colored a picture of usual school methods, the
exaggeration may at least serve to illustrate the point: the need
of active pursuits, involving the use of material to accomplish
purposes, if there are to be situations which normally generate
problems occasioning thoughtful inquiry.

II. There must be data at command to supply the considerations
required in dealing with the specific difficulty which has
presented itself. Teachers following a "developing" method
sometimes tell children to think things out for themselves as if
they could spin them out of their own heads. The material of
thinking is not thoughts, but actions, facts, events, and the
relations of things. In other words, to think effectively one
must have had, or now have, experiences which will furnish him
resources for coping with the difficulty at hand. A difficulty
is an indispensable stimulus to thinking, but not all
difficulties call out thinking. Sometimes they overwhelm and
submerge and discourage. The perplexing situation must be
sufficiently like situations which have already been dealt with
so that pupils will have some control of the meanings of handling
it. A large part of the art of instruction lies in making the
difficulty of new problems large enough to challenge thought, and
small enough so that, in addition to the confusion naturally
attending the novel elements, there shall be luminous familiar
spots from which helpful suggestions may spring.

In one sense, it is a matter of indifference by what
psychological means the subject matter for reflection is
provided. Memory, observation, reading, communication, are all
avenues for supplying data. The relative proportion to be
obtained from each is a matter of the specific features of the
particular problem in hand. It is foolish to insist upon
observation of objects presented to the senses if the student is
so familiar with the objects that he could just as well recall
the facts independently. It is possible to induce undue and
crippling dependence upon sense-presentations. No one can carry
around with him a museum of all the things whose properties will
assist the conduct of thought. A well-trained mind is one that
has a maximum of resources behind it, so to speak, and that is
accustomed to go over its past experiences to see what they
yield. On the other hand, a quality or relation of even a
familiar object may previously have been passed over, and be just
the fact that is helpful in dealing with the question. In this
case direct observation is called for. The same principle
applies to the use to be made of observation on one hand and of
reading and "telling" on the other. Direct observation is
naturally more vivid and vital. But it has its limitations; and
in any case it is a necessary part of education that one should
acquire the ability to supplement the narrowness of his
immediately personal experiences by utilizing the experiences of
others. Excessive reliance upon others for data (whether got
from reading or listening) is to be depreciated. Most
objectionable of all is the probability that others, the book or
the teacher, will supply solutions ready-made, instead of giving
material that the student has to adapt and apply to the question
in hand for himself.

There is no inconsistency in saying that in schools there is
usually both too much and too little information supplied by
others. The accumulation and acquisition of information for
purposes of reproduction in recitation and examination is made
too much of. "Knowledge," in the sense of information, means the
working capital, the indispensable resources, of further inquiry;
of finding out, or learning, more things. Frequently it is
treated as an end itself, and then the goal becomes to heap it up
and display it when called for. This static, cold-storage ideal
of knowledge is inimical to educative development. It not only
lets occasions for thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking.
No one could construct a house on ground cluttered with
miscellaneous junk. Pupils who have stored their "minds" with
all kinds of material which they have never put to intellectual
uses are sure to be hampered when they try to think. They have
no practice in selecting what is appropriate, and no criterion to
go by; everything is on the same dead static level. On the other
hand, it is quite open to question whether, if information
actually functioned in experience through use in application to
the student's own purposes, there would not be need of more
varied resources in books, pictures, and talks than are usually
at command.

III. The correlate in thinking of facts, data, knowledge already
acquired, is suggestions, inferences, conjectured meanings,
suppositions, tentative explanations:--ideas, in short. Careful
observation and recollection determine what is given, what is
already there, and hence assured. They cannot furnish what is
lacking. They define, clarify, and locate the question; they
cannot supply its answer. Projection, invention, ingenuity,
devising come in for that purpose. The data arouse suggestions,
and only by reference to the specific data can we pass upon the
appropriateness of the suggestions. But the suggestions run
beyond what is, as yet, actually given in experience. They
forecast possible results, things to do, not facts (things
already done). Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a
leap from the known.

In this sense, a thought (what a thing suggests but is not as it
is presented) is creative, -- an incursion into the novel. It
involves some inventiveness. What is suggested must, indeed, be
familiar in some context; the novelty, the inventive devising,
clings to the new light in which it is seen, the different use to
which it is put. When Newton thought of his theory of
gravitation, the creative aspect of his thought was not found in
its materials. They were familiar; many of them commonplaces --
sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of numbers.
These were not original ideas; they were established facts. His
originality lay in the use to which these familiar acquaintances
were put by introduction into an unfamiliar context. The same is
true of every striking scientific discovery, every great
invention, every admirable artistic production. Only silly folk
identify creative originality with the extraordinary and
fanciful; others recognize that its measure lies in putting
everyday things to uses which had not occurred to others. The
operation is novel, not the materials out of which it is
constructed.

The educational conclusion which follows is that all thinking is
original in a projection of considerations which have not been
previously apprehended. The child of three who discovers what
can be done with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make
by putting five cents and five cents together, is really a
discoverer, even though everybody else in the world knows it.
There is a genuine increment of experience; not another item
mechanically added on, but enrichment by a new quality. The
charm which the spontaneity of little children has for
sympathetic observers is due to perception of this intellectual
originality. The joy which children themselves experience is the
joy of intellectual constructiveness -- of creativeness, if the
word may be used without misunderstanding. The educational moral
I am chiefly concerned to draw is not, however, that teachers
would find their own work less of a grind and strain if school
conditions favored learning in the sense of discovery and not in
that of storing away what others pour into them; nor that it
would be possible to give even children and youth the delights of
personal intellectual productiveness -- true and important as are
these things. It is that no thought, no idea, can possibly be
conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told,
it is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an
idea. The communication may stimulate the other person to
realize the question for himself and to think out a like idea, or
it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning
effort at thought. But what he directly gets cannot be an idea.
Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first
hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think. When
the parent or teacher has provided the conditions which stimulate
thinking and has taken a sympathetic attitude toward the
activities of the learner by entering into a common or conjoint
experience, all has been done which a second party can do to
instigate learning. The rest lies with the one directly
concerned. If he cannot devise his own solution (not of course
in isolation, but in correspondence with the teacher and other
pupils) and find his own way out he will not learn, not even if
he can recite some correct answer with one hundred per cent
accuracy. We can and do supply ready-made "ideas" by the
thousand; we do not usually take much pains to see that the one
learning engages in significant situations where his own
activities generate, support, and clinch ideas -- that is,
perceived meanings or connections. This does not mean that the
teacher is to stand off and look on; the alternative to
furnishing ready-made subject matter and listening to the
accuracy with which it is reproduced is not quiescence, but
participation, sharing, in an activity. In such shared activity,
the teacher is a learner, and the learner is, without knowing it,
a teacher -- and upon the whole, the less consciousness there is,
on either side, of either giving or receiving instruction, the
better. IV. Ideas, as we have seen, whether they be humble
guesses or dignified theories, are anticipations of possible
solutions. They are anticipations of some continuity or
connection of an activity and a consequence which has not as yet
shown itself. They are therefore tested by the operation of
acting upon them. They are to guide and organize further
observations, recollections, and experiments. They are
intermediate in learning, not final. All educational reformers,
as we have had occasion to remark, are given to attacking the
passivity of traditional education. They have opposed pouring in
from without, and absorbing like a sponge; they have attacked
drilling in material as into hard and resisting rock. But it is
not easy to secure conditions which will make the getting of an
idea identical with having an experience which widens and makes
more precise our contact with the environment. Activity, even
self-activity, is too easily thought of as something merely
mental, cooped up within the head, or finding expression only
through the vocal organs.

While the need of application of ideas gained in study is
acknowledged by all the more successful methods of instruction,
the exercises in application are sometimes treated as devices for
fixing what has already been learned and for getting greater
practical skill in its manipulation. These results are genuine
and not to be despised. But practice in applying what has been
gained in study ought primarily to have an intellectual quality.
As we have already seen, thoughts just as thoughts are
incomplete. At best they are tentative; they are suggestions,
indications. They are standpoints and methods for dealing with
situations of experience. Till they are applied in these
situations they lack full point and reality. Only application
tests them, and only testing confers full meaning and a sense of
their reality. Short of use made of them, they tend to segregate
into a peculiar world of their own. It may be seriously
questioned whether the philosophies (to which reference has been
made in section 2 of chapter X) which isolate mind and set it
over against the world did not have their origin in the fact that
the reflective or theoretical class of men elaborated a large
stock of ideas which social conditions did not allow them to act
upon and test. Consequently men were thrown back into their own
thoughts as ends in themselves.

However this may be, there can be no doubt that a peculiar
artificiality attaches to much of what is learned in schools. It
can hardly be said that many students consciously think of the
subject matter as unreal; but it assuredly does not possess for
them the kind of reality which the subject matter of their vital
experiences possesses. They learn not to expect that sort of
reality of it; they become habituated to treating it as having
reality for the purposes of recitations, lessons, and
examinations. That it should remain inert for the experiences of
daily life is more or less a matter of course. The bad effects
are twofold. Ordinary experience does not receive the enrichment
which it should; it is not fertilized by school learning. And
the attitudes which spring from getting used to and accepting
half-understood and ill-digested material weaken vigor and
efficiency of thought.

If we have dwelt especially on the negative side, it is for the
sake of suggesting positive measures adapted to the effectual
development of thought. Where schools are equipped with
laboratories, shops, and gardens, where dramatizations, plays,
and games are freely used, opportunities exist for reproducing
situations of life, and for acquiring and applying information
and ideas in the carrying forward of progressive experiences.
Ideas are not segregated, they do not form an isolated island.
They animate and enrich the ordinary course of life. Information
is vitalized by its function; by the place it occupies in
direction of action. The phrase "opportunities exist" is used
purposely. They may not be taken advantage of; it is possible to
employ manual and constructive activities in a physical way, as
means of getting just bodily skill; or they may be used almost
exclusively for "utilitarian," i.e., pecuniary, ends. But the
disposition on the part of upholders of "cultural" education to
assume that such activities are merely physical or professional
in quality, is itself a product of the philosophies which isolate
mind from direction of the course of experience and hence from
action upon and with things. When the "mental" is regarded as a
self-contained separate realm, a counterpart fate befalls bodily
activity and movements. They are regarded as at the best mere
external annexes to mind. They may be necessary for the
satisfaction of bodily needs and the attainment of external
decency and comfort, but they do not occupy a necessary place in
mind nor enact an indispensable role in the completion of
thought. Hence they have no place in a liberal education--i.e.,
one which is concerned with the interests of intelligence. If
they come in at all, it is as a concession to the material needs
of the masses. That they should be allowed to invade the
education of the elite is unspeakable. This conclusion follows
irresistibly from the isolated conception of mind, but by the
same logic it disappears when we perceive what mind really is --
namely, the purposive and directive factor in the
development of experience. While it is desirable that all
educational institutions should be equipped so as to give
students an opportunity for acquiring and testing ideas and
information in active pursuits typifying important social
situations, it will, doubtless, be a long time before all of them
are thus furnished. But this state of affairs does not afford
instructors an excuse for folding their hands and persisting in
methods which segregate school knowledge. Every recitation in
every subject gives an opportunity for establishing cross
connections between the subject matter of the lesson and the
wider and more direct experiences of everyday life. Classroom
instruction falls into three kinds. The least desirable treats
each lesson as an independent whole. It does not put upon the
student the responsibility of finding points of contact between
it and other lessons in the same subject, or other subjects of
study. Wiser teachers see to it that the student is
systematically led to utilize his earlier lessons to help
understand the present one, and also to use the present to throw
additional light upon what has already been acquired. Results
are better, but school subject matter is still isolated. Save by
accident, out-of-school experience is left in its crude and
comparatively irreflective state. It is not subject to the
refining and expanding influences of the more accurate and
comprehensive material of direct instruction. The latter is not
motivated and impregnated with a sense of reality by being
intermingled with the realities of everyday life. The best type
of teaching bears in mind the desirability of affecting this
interconnection. It puts the student in the habitual attitude of
finding points of contact and mutual bearings.

Summary. Processes of instruction are unified in the degree in
which they center in the production of good habits of thinking.
While we may speak, without error, of the method of thought, the
important thing is that thinking is the method of an educative
experience. The essentials of method are therefore identical
with the essentials of reflection. They are first that the pupil
have a genuine situation of experience -- that there be a
continuous activity in which he is interested for its own sake;
secondly, that a genuine problem develop within this situation as
a stimulus to thought; third, that he possess the information and
make the observations needed to deal with it; fourth, that
suggested solutions occur to him which he shall be responsible
for developing in an orderly way; fifth, that he have opportunity
and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make their
meaning clear and to discover for himself their validity.